des, representing the people, defends the
position of the mother; Apollo pleads for the father, and ends by
declaring, in a fit of patriarchal delirium, that _the child is not of
the blood of the mother_. "It is not the mother who begets what is
called her child; she is only the nurse of the germ poured into her
womb; he who begets is the father. The woman receives the germ merely
as guardian, and when it pleases the gods, she preserves it." Plato
also brings forward this view, and states that the mother contributes
nothing to the child's being. "The mother is to the child what the
soil is to the plant; it owes its nourishment to her, but the essence
and structure of its nature are derived from the father." Again the
Orestes of Euripides takes up the same theory, when he says to
Tyndarus: "My father has begotten me, and thy daughter has given birth
to me, as the earth receives the seed that another confides to it."
Here we trace a different world of thoughts and conceptions; the
mother was so little esteemed as to be degraded into the mere
nourisher of the child. These patriarchal theories naturally
consecrated the slavery of woman.[232]

[232] McLennan, _Studies_, "Kinship in Ancient Greece";
Letourneau, _Evolution of Marriage_, pp. 336-337, and
Starcke, _The Primitive Family_, pp. 115-116.

Another point strikingly illustrated by many of these ancient legends
is the struggle for power between the two sexes--a struggle that would
seem to have been present at all stages of civilisation, but always
most active in periods of transition. One out of many examples is all
that I can give. In Hawaii, worship is given to the goddess Pele, the
personification of the volcano Kilauea, and the god Tamapua, the
personification of the sea, or rather, of the storm which lashes the
sea and hurls wave after wave upon the land. The myth tells that
Tamapua wooed Pele, who rejected his suit, whereupon he flooded the
crater with water, but Pele drank up the water and drove him back into
the sea.[233]

[233] Starcke, pp. 249-250, citing Bachofen's _Antiquarische
Briefe_, Vol. I, p. 140.

Here a brief digression into the early mythologies may be made,
although this question of the connection between mother-right and
religious ideas is one on which I have already enlarged. The most
primitive theogony is that of Mother-Earth and her son. Goddesses are
at first of greater importance than gods. The Earth-mother springs
f